Risk Factor Identification and Classification of Macrosomic Newborns by Neural Networks

This paper presents a first approach to try to determine if a newborn will be macrosomic before the labor, using a set of data taken from the mother. The problem of determining if a newborn is going to be macrosomic is important in order to plan cesarean section and other problems during the labor. The proposed model to classify the weight is a neural network whose design is based recent algorithms that will allow the networks to focus on a concrete class. Before proceeding with the design methodology to obtain the models, a previous step of variable selection is performed in order to indentify the risk factors and to avoid the curse of dimensionality. Another study is made regarding the missing values in the database since the data were not complete for all the patients. The results will show how useful the addition of the missing values into the original data set can be in order to identify new risk factors.